sports

More than 2,900 athletes from 92 nations and territories are competing in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The event has 15 different sports (and many events within each). Which sports have the most athletes? Hockey, which requires a 23-person roster, leads the list, followed by largely individual sports, such as alpine and cross-country skiing:

Here’s how those sports break down by the number of competing countries. Again, alpine skiing is a main draw:

Here’s a breakdown of participation in each sport by gender:

And, finally, a look at how each continent is represented proportionally by sport:

As a kid growing up in Tallahassee, I both cherished and dreaded the Florida State vs. Florida rivalry. As a ‘Noles fan, the game too often ended in defeat, occasionally dashing my team’s national title hopes.

But I’ll always remember the best game of the rivalry — the 1994 “Choke at Doke” — in which the Gators gave up a 31-3 lead in the fourth quarter, settling for a 31-31 tie. (FSU won the “fifth quarter” rematch that season at the Sugar Bowl).

This chart shows the point differential between the two teams since 1958. You can see that FSU dominated the rivalry in the 1990s. Florida largely owned the 2000s.

Last week I attended a day-long session with Edward Tufte, the “Leonardo Di Vinci of data,” as The New York Times once dubbed him. The session has inspired me to take the blog off paternity leave. About time.

Inside Tufte’s book “Beautiful Evidence” is a section on “sparklines,” which are small, word-sized line graphs. The section includes a visualization of a baseball season, with lines for each team showing their day-to-day trends above or below the .500 line.

The line graphs I made below, inspired by Tufte’s sparklines on page 54, show each team’s progress in the 2012 season.

First, the National League West, which includes the eventual World Series winner San Francisco. The Giants passed Los Angeles around the middle of the season and never looked back. The chart also shows Colorado’s steep collapse at the end:

Now the National League East, in which Washington led for most of the season and Philadelphia closed strong to finish its season above the .500 win-loss line.

And the National League Central, in which Houston had a terrible season:

In the American League East, New York held off Baltimore’s surge after the all-star break, and Toronto and Boston collapsed in August and September:

Detroit overtook Chicago during the last days of the season in the American League Central:

In the American League West, Texas closed poorly finish second to late-surging Oakland:

Finally, I added all the teams to one graph to show the difference in team performance. This makes color-coding lines impossible, so I included a table with each squad’s over-under .500 figure. You can see how San Francisco performed in bold black:

Notes: The charts depict each day of the season, not each game. Also, the charts should be viewed separately. Because of the variance in each division, the y axes differ. I’ve uploaded the data to Google Docs. Feel free to download the file and send me visualizations of your own.

In previewing tonight’s national championship game between LSU and Alabama, USA Today reports that a high-scoring contest isn’t expected:

LSU and Alabama combined for just 15 points in their November matchup that saw neither team reach the end zone.

The anticipated defensive struggle Monday night will contrast with the Rose, Fiesta and Orange Bowl which totaled 83, 79 and 103 points, respectively. In fact, in those three games there were more points in eight of the 12 quarters than the previous November matchup between the Tigers and Crimson Tide.

But how have these teams scored in previous matchups? Since 1902, the Tigers and the Crimson Tide have faced off 74 times, with an average combined score of about 32 points — twice the total from this season’s earlier game.

This histogram shows the number of games in 10-point increments. Twenty games have resulted in 40 or more points (see larger version):

There have been some low-scoring games over the years, but also some real shootouts. In 2007, for example, the matchup resulted in 75 points, with LSU winning 41-34. This line chart shows the trend over time (see larger version):